Thomas Steeples attends European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI)

During the summer of 2019, I was able to attend the 31st occasion of the European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI).

This takes place in a different European country each year, and was at the University of Latvia in Riga this year. It was an intensive, two week summer school, with lectures from 09:00 to 18:30 each day, with special evening lectures afterwards. The lectures spanned across three

tracks: Language and Logic, Language and Computation and Logic and Computation. Given my research, I mainly attended lectures from the Logic and Computation track but in the interest of breadth, I did dip into the other tracks.

The Logic and Computation lectures explored exciting new areas of modern logic research that I hadn't been exposed to before. Highlights for me included a course on reasoning about knowledge and resources in games, and another course on responsibility, that is, can we attribute certain outcomes to particular agents? - an important question in this AI age.

The summer school was worthwhile just by the virtue of it introducing me to things I was previously unaware of.

On a softer note, Riga was a beautiful city to explore, with wonderful food and drink. There was also plenty of opportunities to network and get to know fellow logic PhDs from across a range of disciplines from around the world. I would highly recommend doing a summer school to any DPhil student considering it!